The truth is that this is not just an issue of laziness or incompetence, it's part of a policy intended to generate extra, "off the books" revenue the
company accountants put into a kind of corporate slush fund for bonuses and incentives. It's tax free profit and there's no doubt of this because they
have to have a mechanism in place to go back and recover that money from the store's accounts.
(You buy an item for 10.00 in July and use a gift receipt. In August the person you give the item to returns it but now the item is on sale for 5.00
so they give them 5.00. That still leaves 5.00 in the accounting system for July. You bet your ass they automatically transfer that 5.00 out of the
store's current accounts and the paperwork is automatically created to account for the difference in the store accounts and to remove that money from
the sales tax record).
So now, that money is transferred to a holding account and they've taken 5.00 in taxable revenue and converted it to 5.00 of non taxable revenue
(because they also file a transaction that shows they refunded the full purchase amount, not what they actually refunded for the tax man).
It's a fact that every cash register in every Walmart is linked by Satellite to corporate HQ. They use this to change prices instantly in every store
in the chain. They are also working on implementing electronic price tags which will also be linked to the system so you could literally pick up an
item and 1 minute later the price on the shelf will change and match what the register rings up - no matter if the price goes up or down. This is not
illegal, they are free to raise or lower prices and until you complete the sale there is no guarantee regardless of what the price shown on the item
says.
They hire teams of experts who arrange items and price tags on shelves in specific schemes to either make you think you are getting an item for less
than it will actually ring up for to outright fraud by instantly adjusting pricing higher when they track an item with a high number of "pricing
related incidents" in a store or instantly cash in on higher than normal demand (especially for items related to natural disasters such as bottled
water, generators, etc).
This is just one example of the black art of cashless commerce. From creating gift card policies and expirations to maximize defaults (money left on
gift cards which is recovered as tax free profit in much the same way as the return differences) to offering their own credit cards and now a type of
debit card.
Card issuers use late fees, yearly dues and process transactions before deposits to do all kinds of tricks they can't do with hard currency.
This culture of greed is behind the drive to install smart meters in homes for utilities, the coming change to permanent identifiable access to
Internet services and tracking technology such as RFID. Get ready to pay twice for just about anything and everything - every foot you move, how much
air you breath and any other resource you consume. You're about to pay taxes on top of taxes for every possible reason.
edit on 4-2-2013 by
ecoparity because: (no reason given)
edit on 4-2-2013 by ecoparity because: (no reason given)